Paula Allen: HemisFair neighborhood recalled

Readers send in recollections of long-gone downtown area.

Updated 9:08 pm, Sunday, October 2, 2011

Our church, Baptist Temple, is celebrating its 100-year anniversary this year. It was located at several sites prior to moving in 1927 to its present location at Interstate 10 and Gevers. Our Centennial Committee, of which I am a member, has found that the church started in 1911 in a home at 301 North St. at the intersection of North and Water. We have located Water on a city map, but there is no North Street anywhere near that area, in the vicinity of the former Victoria Courts and the Alamodome. All we can think of is that since 1911, North Street underwent a name change. Could you shed some light on this and find what that street is called now?

In response to this question about North Street in last week's column, readers wrote with their recollections about this short street that was subsumed by construction of HemisFair '68. Most of the buildings in the surrounding neighborhood of homes and small businesses were razed to make way for San Antonio's first world's fair, including the area where the Baptist Temple's original premises stood.

Xavier Saldaña, a self-described old-map hobbyist, consulted several maps from before the time of the church's founding, made some measurements and compared them with current maps; in his opinion, 301 North St. was at the site of what's now the Grand Hyatt hotel, 600 Market St. According to Koch's 1886 “Bird's Eye View of the City of San Antonio,” the structure that was the church's first home was directly across from Reimann's Planing Mill, directly across North Street near the intersection with Water Street.

Many years later, a Dairy Queen stood at that corner, says another reader, George Carrera, who offered a personal take on the neighborhood before HemisFair. Carrera lived on Lafitte Street in the early 1960s and recalls that the intersection of North and Water streets was “a little hub of neighborhood activity.”

Restaurateur Ralph Hernandez had a meat market a few blocks south on Water Street before going on to open the Little Red Barn Steakhouse at Hackberry and Rigsby streets. The original Four Brothers steak house — “considered by some to serve the best steaks in the downtown area” — was on South Street, parallel to North, before the fair compelled a move to a second, less-successful location on Augusta Street. The Labor Temple union hall, where social events as well as meetings were held, was on North Street approaching South Alamo, where there was an early Church's Fried Chicken stand on the “outer fringe” of the neighborhood.

Not one but two of the oldest houses built on North Street once belonged to the family of F.I. Meyer, an importer of wines and owner of a wine and liquor store on Alamo Plaza.

“When the Meyers outgrew their first home at 144 North St., they built a second house next door,” says Meyer's great-great-granddaughter, Susan E. Klein, who sent an undated newspaper clipping that describes the newer house as “the first two-story building to be erected in its neighborhood.” An accompanying photograph shows a massive stone house with a balcony; materials for the house, says the story, “were brought to San Antonio by oxcart,” which indicates that it was built before the coming of the city's first railroad in 1877.

A prominent merchant, Meyer was variously known as Franz Ignatz, Francois, Ignace, Francisco Ignacio and Frank — “such was the international flair of San Antonio in the 1800s,” Klein says. As German Americans, the Meyer family attended St. Joseph's Catholic Church, founded in 1868 by German immigrants at 623 E. Commerce St., on the northern edge of the old neighborhood.

“The descendants of F.I. Meyer convene for Mass at St. Joseph's on the Friday before Good Friday every year,” Klein says.

When her ancestor donated St. Joseph's main altar, a statue of the Sorrowful Mother and other items, he requested that a Mass be said every year for his descendants living and dead. It's still celebrated, commonly known as the Meyer Mass.